These are actually two different "rename" commands. bgaluszka's version is usually found on Fedora/RHEL/etc. systems coming from the util-linux package, while y

These are actually two different "rename" commands. bgaluszka's version is usually found on Fedora/RHEL/etc. systems coming from the util-linux package, while your version is usually found on Debian/Ubuntu/etc. systems coming from the Perl package. I prefer the regex one, of course, especially since it takes proper Perl regexes :) You have to be careful of this though and probably avoid using this command in shell scripts. edit: You can just stick Debian's rename at $HOME/bin/rename.pl and call it a day; this command is useful in the terminal since it's less typing than a for loop.